- 1 day ago
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:10I would have had more, but I was full of Shepard shit.
00:13Well, this is it.
00:14I'd have a marriage.
00:16Exactly.
00:17The way they are crushed inside those lorries.
00:19The vets hit them with planks.
00:21Vets!
00:21Exactly.
00:22They're so huge.
00:23They're an animal.
00:24There's some boo-hoo about calves.
00:26They do that with crabs.
00:27They don't see you weeping about crabs.
00:29Well, I think every animal has as much right to decent treatment as we do.
00:32You're wrong, and you're a grotesquely ugly freak.
00:35Thanks.
00:37Animal rights.
00:38It's an extremely controversial subject, and it's not just the odd dinner party punch-up over squealing meat.
00:43It's the Spaniards chucking horses out of church towers.
00:46The Chinese sucking the brains out of live monkeys.
00:49And now this, a shocking example taken from a recent Libyan news.
00:56The footage shows a ritual from the feast of Ayd al-Abdha.
01:00An outdoor celebration in which the men of Tripoli have a great time, but the same cannot be said for
01:07their cattle.
01:08At the climax of the feast, a cow is rounded up and driven into a metal tube.
01:14A tube which is charged with explosives.
01:19The cow is fired through the air and lands in a crunched-up bone heap.
01:24Running men then clobber any remaining life out of it with their fists and feet and sticks.
01:30The body is dragged about and then left for the dogs and jackals.
01:34And possibly scorpions if they meet, I don't know.
01:38Tonight on Brass Eye.
01:41Animals.
01:42Are we too nice or too nasty?
02:13Over the centuries,
02:14man's relationship with animals has been complex.
02:18In ancient Egypt,
02:19felines were worshipped because the Egyptians thought they were funny.
02:23Many of today's familiar relics are cat monuments.
02:28These vast cat heads were built underground and seen by no one.
02:33Europe too has its animal traditions.
02:36In Zaragoza, the streets still get crazy with the annual running of the wasp.
02:41In Britain in the last century, it was quite acceptable for a young gentleman
02:45to lose his virginity to one of London's many whore dogs.
02:49Dickens and Prince Albert both boasted of their experience.
02:54Today, animals are used more discreetly as a vital lubricant in the wheels of government.
03:00It was my job for 17 years to procure wild beasts for the House of Parliament.
03:06I had to get bats, gibbons.
03:09Ex-civil servant Foster Pan purchased over a thousand animals to work in Westminster.
03:14Michael Hasseltine finds it very useful if he's angry to have an ape to slap.
03:20Kenneth Clark has a baby moose in a cupboard.
03:24The most commonly used animals are zebras, hurrying between offices with documents pinned to their bodies.
03:30Tony Benn had a tapir in the 70s that he used to send messages on around Whitehall.
03:35Rue messages to the Lords, I always remember.
03:37He used to pin to the head of the tapir.
03:40Most of it was great fun. I enjoyed the job.
03:43The only real difficulty I had was trying to haul a basking shark up the Thames for Jack Ashley.
03:49It didn't really work out. It died after about three days of being tethered to the terrace.
03:56Jack was quite unpopular after that for a while.
04:00So much for the fat brass of Westminster, but this East London boozer knows all about animal abuse.
04:06Because here, every week, beer users gather to watch large men fight with weasels.
04:13There's normally about 40 men in a room standing around in a ring
04:17and a bag above your head.
04:20Somebody pulls a string, the weasels cascade out onto you
04:22and you've got as short a term as possible to dispatch them all.
04:27I've seen a man die weasel fighting.
04:29When you're fighting a weasel, he's bigger than a man.
04:33And there is money in it, if you're good.
04:36There's other perks as well.
04:39The women, they fancy you if they see you kicking the shit out of a weasel.
04:43After 13 years, in which he pulped over 4,000 weasels,
04:47Bernard Lering suffered a compound nervous breakdown.
04:50I lost it.
04:51And I just picked up a living doing otters, which are very easy.
04:56They're very docile animals.
04:58And even when they pump them full of rat hormones, which...
05:03You can kill an otter in about a second.
05:08It's kick its face off.
05:10There are many legal sports that kill animals too.
05:13I think the thing that people get fussed about
05:17is that a fox is a small brown fairy animal, very much like a dog.
05:21I don't think they'd be nearly so worried
05:23if it was a little four-legged car full of chips.
05:27The evil in our relationship remains a paradox.
05:30If you plot number of animals abused against what makes people cruel
05:34versus intelligence of either party,
05:37the pattern is so unreadable, you might as well draw in a chain of fox heads on sticks.
05:42And if you do that, an interesting thing happens.
05:45The word cruel starts flashing.
05:48So, are we cruel to hunt foxes?
05:51The fox feels nothing.
05:53It's made of string.
05:56Or are we too nice?
05:58This is a busload of flies that are being sent on holiday to Africa.
06:02They'll enjoy Somalia, but should they?
06:05Can it possibly be right for gene men to play with DNA?
06:08This one survived a couple of days and then just peeled over and died.
06:13Is this wrong?
06:14How on earth can you justify this?
06:18And has anybody ever come up with a reasonable argument for this?
06:28Of course, animals and man have co-existed since long before we all evolved.
06:33But while cruelty still makes our hearts bleed like fresh Operation Skies in a hot bath,
06:38our daily language is full of abuse with expressions like frog stupid.
06:43Why?
06:43For some answers, David Jatt asked Carla Lane for them.
06:48I saw something in the paper this morning waiting.
06:51A bulldog mauled a girl.
06:53We don't want that.
06:54No.
06:55We wouldn't like a girl to maul a bulldog either.
06:57No.
06:58But when you read on, you learn that some boys threw the bulldog into the garden
07:04to get a fight together.
07:06Now, the bulldog was put down.
07:08But nobody said, what did they do to the bulldog before they put it in the garden?
07:12They take the tail, they wind it up like that, they tweak its central nervous system
07:17and it goes like a bloody rocket.
07:18Yes.
07:18And the fact is...
07:19But they put it down.
07:20No thought.
07:21Of course.
07:22Now, they put the dog down.
07:23What would you like to see to happen to the people that wound up its tail
07:26and fired it off like some elastic-powered guy?
07:28There are no words to describe.
07:30Prison's not good enough because prison's become bed and breakfast and telly.
07:34Prison's too good.
07:35Erm...
07:36What about jail?
07:36Perhaps they ought to be...
07:38They should have their coccyx twisted.
07:39Yes.
07:39And now people are going to say...
07:41Can I just say, this, which has been prepared by the news graphic people, represents what's
07:49going on in one way.
07:50Is that the sort of thing that you would agree with?
07:53Human version of it.
07:54Yes.
07:55I think so.
07:56Because, erm...
07:58I've been 20 years...
08:00I bet.
08:00...going to the ministers.
08:01And they're finding out what man does.
08:04Yeah.
08:04Not only to calves and sheep.
08:06What?
08:06To everything.
08:07Frogs, legs they're on to.
08:09Weasel fighting in the East End.
08:10Everything.
08:11I mean, pulling live weasels out of the wild.
08:14And making them fight a man.
08:16Yeah.
08:16And, you know, they have...
08:18We do have endearing, wonderful habits, animals.
08:21I had two guinea pigs and they were both 11 years old.
08:23And one died.
08:24And, you know, just before it died, it washed its little face.
08:27From what you're saying, have we got it right or wrong?
08:30So far.
08:31What, people?
08:32People.
08:33Wrong.
08:34We're right here.
08:35A hundred million times people wrong.
08:38What chance of getting even here, let alone here?
08:43Oh, dear.
08:45Not much.
08:47Here?
08:48Never in my lifetime or yours.
08:50Just watch this then.
08:51How many thousand years?
08:52We're trying this and there's a tension and it's just going to go back like that.
08:56I think so.
09:01During the Blitz, when many clocks were destroyed, Londoners could tell the time by watching
09:05a dog throw itself off a high board, which it did precisely every 60 seconds, 24 hours
09:12a day for over eight months.
09:18Institutionalized cruelty is one thing, but the twisted brain wrong of a one-off man mental
09:23is quite another.
09:25Ted Maul disturbs.
09:26Arable Wiltshire, a peaceful country haven supporting rural life like something out
09:32of a cheese ad.
09:33It doesn't look troubled.
09:35But it is.
09:36At least for one of these cows.
09:38Thanks to money, this, and a human mind as bent as a bad hedge.
09:45Six months ago, life for a cow here at Park Farm was pretty much like this.
09:50Nothing much going on here.
09:52But last June,
09:53but last June out of nowhere, anti-cow slogan started appearing on the sheds.
09:57The text specifically designed to undermine the cow's confidence.
10:03Local press caught whiff of a weird one when the vandal shot his paint straight at the cow in the
10:08form of
10:08words like twat and later fuck nut and arse candle as the campaign plunged into overdrive.
10:17Next came a wave of sick attachments.
10:19Cow attached to a filing cabinet.
10:22Cow attached to a mini-engine in a shopping trolley.
10:25What sort of mind would do this?
10:27And what's the result?
10:28We contacted a huge bank of psychiatrists in the States.
10:31Yeah, we thought so too.
10:31They told us, the guy's a homo.
10:35He's definitely homosexual.
10:36Then a breakthrough.
10:37The vandal was caught on camera.
10:40You're a bum, you've got no niggers, have you?
10:41This farmer's son's handicap footage shows him at work.
10:45Come on, come on.
10:47Whispering inept insults down a wire straight into the cow's head.
10:51Don't you know what electricity is? The planets in the wire, isn't it?
10:55The man was Simon Hotrin, known locally as Chob.
10:59Push off my wire.
11:00He does odd jobs and lives in a field.
11:02Toss ours.
11:03But that night, Chob had discovered a bad new hobby.
11:08Idiot, fucking idiot, idiot, idiot, idiot, idiot, idiot.
11:11Stupid, stupid fucking idiot.
11:13It seemed the resulting court action would be an open and shut case, but it wasn't.
11:18These pics from the Biebs Western Region show.
11:20But what, free on a technicality?
11:24Local feeling ran high.
11:26One activist got so angry, he donned the cow suit and land Hotrin right outside the court.
11:31Wow, he chopped him in the gob.
11:33And he's legged it.
11:35Great running.
11:36He may have been free, but Chob owed the world an explanation.
11:40Right, you, I'm gonna muck your lens, all right, you gay sod.
11:43Hotrin prevented himself giving us a real interview,
11:46but during our visit we gleaned vital clues from some documents we nicked through an open window.
11:53These docks show that Hotrin had been driven nuts because the land on which he lives is owned by the
11:59cow.
11:59In the will of Edith Bates, a local crone who loved cattle, then eccentric, now dead,
12:05the cow inherited the land and a special bank account for stockpiling rent.
12:11Meanwhile, for the beast, which knows nothing of money or bitter mankind,
12:15life has become a living cow mare thanks to the thoughtless beneficence of a mad old woman.
12:30So far, do we have it right or wrong?
12:32Let's have a look at the answer, Prancer.
12:38Thanks.
12:39Find out exactly what to think next.
12:43Still to come up, David Jatt meets Peregrine Worsthorne.
12:47Here's a point.
12:50We execute wasps, but we don't execute dogs.
12:55We execute wasps because they sting us and dogs give us pleasure.
12:59Do wasps really sting us?
13:01Well, they do.
13:02I mean, they have stung me and it seemed like a sting.
13:05Was it actually a sting?
13:08I call it a sting.
13:10I mean, I'm a creature of habit.
13:11You see, I've never been stung by a wasp.
13:17I don't necessarily believe we're told they sting.
13:21Well, I have been stung by a wasp and they do sting.
13:24People say that snakes sting and snakes bite.
13:28I haven't been stung by a snake, I'm glad to say.
13:31Well, that's because they bite.
13:31If I had, I would bite.
13:33Now that, weirdly, I believe and yet I've never been bitten by a snake.
13:38Why don't I believe, why do a lot of people not believe that wasps sting?
13:42Well, come out into our garden in South Bucks on a summer's day.
13:49I'll find you a wasp and I think...
13:52Sting me with it.
13:52What?
13:53You'd sting me with a wasp.
13:55This is a conversation...
13:56Yes.
14:26This is a conversation...
14:27Before it all stops, a school tour for the Oxford Don who believes all animals are vegetarian.
14:35Now, what do crocodiles eat?
14:37Natalie?
14:38Other animals.
14:41No, they eat grass.
14:43Why wildlife documentaries are often misleading...
14:47There is some very famous footage of a lion killing a wildebeest. How do you explain that?
14:52The lion may have been chasing the wildebeest. In fact, it was chasing it to catch up with it,
14:56to give it a potato.
14:57And can animal breeding go too far? A discussion point for David Jatt and horse jumper Oliver Skeet.
15:05Is it because they don't have legs that it makes spherical cows so bad?
15:08Or is it because that there's some kind of cruelty involved? I mean, what, what, what, what, what, what?
15:14I'm not actually sure what they do to the cows, right?
15:16Well, they breed them in a particular direction, interfere with their genes, so they're just a big ball of meat.
15:21No, well, you see, I wouldn't like to eat that, definitely.
15:23If I knew I was eating that, I would, I would go absolutely mad.
15:26It's like somebody putting, I don't know, a bit of snot in a bit of bread and giving it to
15:30you.
15:31It's the same thing.
15:31Really? That sort of thing?
15:32Yeah.
15:33Somebody's at a restaurant, to give you this scenario, right?
15:35Somebody out there, and they get what they think is a piece of spherical cow on their plate.
15:39What do they do?
15:40They just eat it, don't they?
15:42But what should they do? For God's sake, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
15:46Well, I mean, what they should do, really, is make us think about it.
15:48They should start phoning up people and start complaining about, you know, the meat that they're eating.
15:52This came from a spherical cow, how dare you sell this to me?
15:54That's right, of course.
16:00There was more good news for animals with Mike Fox's elephant campaign last month.
16:04Let me explain.
16:06If this elephant was called Mike Fox, then it would have exactly the same name as the man that did
16:11the campaign about the elephant last month.
16:13Mike Fox and Andrew Dean, these men hate zoos.
16:17Together, they run the World Organization for Decreasing Captive Animal Problems, WAFTCAP, which incorporates against animal anger and auto-causal
16:27abuse atrocities in zoos.
16:29Ahs.
16:30Two weeks ago, they read about Carla, an East German elephant who'd been so upset by captivity, she'd stuck her
16:37trunk in her anus.
16:38In seconds, a campaign was born to publicise Carla's plight in a video and tell the world about zookosis, the
16:47disease that drives animals nuts.
16:49Jilly Cooper was busy writing a book.
16:52Hello?
16:53Hello, has Jilly come out of her shed?
16:54Yes, speaking.
16:54But Fox persuaded her to send a drawing of Carla in her plight.
16:59Thank you very much for your picture.
17:00Oh.
17:01And we showed it to Carla.
17:03Oh.
17:04And I think she gave a little elephant smile.
17:05Oh, I love that.
17:07I want to cry.
17:07That's sweet.
17:08The zoo is, you know, still not acknowledging the problem.
17:11They are bastards, right?
17:12That she could be accommodated by Jimmy Page.
17:14Absolutely.
17:14I mean, it's only because it's a terrible year for me because I'm doing this bloody book.
17:18Oh, bloody book.
17:19Oh, duck.
17:19It made me very happy.
17:21Alright, Jilly.
17:21Thanks.
17:22Bye.
17:22With Jilly's drawing on her shirt, Britt Eklund told the world about WAFTCAP.
17:27Last year, they stopped penguins catapulting each other through the glass roof at Sydney Zoo.
17:34Last month, they stopped a pig throwing itself out of a tree onto a python in a two-way death
17:40pact in Chester.
17:42Now they want to help Carla, an East German elephant who has got her trunk jammed up her
17:49own guts.
17:52I can't understand the mentality or the physical make-up, mental make-up of anybody that lets
17:58an elephant get into that condition.
18:00Paul Daniel's contribution moved all who saw it to horrible tears.
18:04Carla, the elephant, is currently curled up in a kind of a grey ball.
18:09Her trunk is actually stuck up her anus and they're not trying to help her.
18:14So we must.
18:16I'll give you another one that you can cut in later.
18:19I'll just say that.
18:20Okay.
18:21And you can cut it in later.
18:22Yeah.
18:23Well, go to the elephant, go to somewhere else.
18:25Sorry.
18:26And still rolling.
18:30Come on.
18:31Help us get that trunk out.
18:33And so thank Christ for Wolf the Gladiator, who joined not a moment too soon.
18:39Urgent news.
18:40Carla has started to ingest her own head.
18:44Her dung pump mechanism has blown.
18:48There's bloody vegetable gas everywhere.
18:52For God's sake, help us pull her trunk out.
18:56She needs wolf power or she will explode in a shower of pulped yams.
19:02Please help me and Oz get Carla's trunk out the end of her guts.
19:08With that ace burst of wolf, the waft cap appeal was ready for its final phase.
19:14You've heard a great deal about Carla, the poor little elephant in this East German zoo
19:18who's suffering horrendously, horribly.
19:22Desmond Morris, the great anthropologist, the author of The Naked Ape,
19:28who understands more about animals than probably anybody,
19:30has written this little poem about Carla.
19:34I'd like to read it to you.
19:36Aren't we a bunch of fuckwits?
19:39An elephant could no more get its trunk up its arse than we could lick our balls.
19:47Well, after that, we're obviously pretty close to a solution.
19:50There are three points to remember.
19:51Firstly, cruelty has not been eliminated.
19:53These two goats are going to box each other's heads in next weekend.
19:57And there's nothing the law can do about it.
19:59On the other hand, you can be too nice.
20:02This woman spent her life savings on plastic surgery to make her dog look like Ralph Fiennes.
20:08I think it's a little bit of an improvement on the original.
20:12Well, the way ahead's obviously through compromise.
20:15Next month sees the introduction of new regulations for slaughterhouses.
20:19How are these going to work?
20:20Oh, yes, well, we kill 400 cows a week, and to redress the balance to some extent,
20:25we'll be slaughtering one member of our staff every six weeks approximately.
20:28And that's where he comes in?
20:29Yes, this is it.
20:30Are you happy about this?
20:31Oh, yes, yes.
20:32Thank you so much for coming in.
20:34Hello.
20:35Hello.
20:36So whatever you forget about tonight's programme, remember this.
20:41Introduction time.
20:42Let's talk about cows.
20:44This is the grave of a cow.
20:47As you will see, it was killed in unnecessary pain by a man.
20:51I think we agree with that, don't we, Carla?
20:53I agree, yes.
20:55If we think it's bad in this country, if we think it's bad in Europe,
20:59it's worse in Libya.
21:01Take a look at this piece of VT.
21:03The men gather round and finish it off with their feet,
21:08drag it through the town and leave it quite often to the jackals and the dogs.
21:13In fact, the end word of this news report from the newsreader's mouth is,
21:17wow, look at that dead bastard.
21:19That incident itself that we've just seen at the Libyan cattle sorter, right or wrong?
21:23Wrong.
21:25That wrong?
21:26Yes, absolutely wrong.
21:28OK, yeah, you can kill the tape.
21:30Oh, yes, please, kill the tape.
21:32Kill the tape.
21:34Hi, this is Alexandra Paul from Baywatch.
21:37Please help me get Carla's head out of her guts now before she explodes.
21:42Just imagine how she feels.
21:44Oh, gosh.
21:45Oh, goodness me.
21:47Goodness.
21:47I've just received this.
21:49Now, our vet has managed to get in an hour ago.
21:52Uh-huh.
21:53And she managed to pull Carla's head out.
21:56Oh, God.
21:58What does it say?
21:59Her head came out, but it had shrunk.
22:03And it was now small and smooth and white.
22:07And so did she put it back in?
22:09No, she's walking around, it says here, with a small, smooth, white head about the size of a man's head.
22:14God.
22:14She's got eyes.
22:17But she hasn't got any ears.
22:19Oh.
22:19And it looks like one of our helpers, Andrew Dean, got sucked in.
22:25No.
22:27He's breathing through a tube.
22:30Oh, Jesus.
22:31And he's stuck inside.
22:33I think you should get a press release out.
22:36Which paper would print it, do you know?
22:38Well, you put it over AP.
22:41You put it over a P.
22:43You put it over the, over the wire services.
22:46Well, you put a wire over a P.
22:50No, no, this is, um...
22:52Is it like a distribution P?
22:54I phone up a P, and I send it down the wire to the P, and then the P sends
22:58it out to all the newspapers.
23:01Yeah.
23:03And thanks very much for your thoughts, Alexandra.
23:05Okay, and, um...
23:06I pass on your good wishes to all concerned, particularly to Andrew.
23:10If he's still going.
23:27I'll see you next time soon.
23:27I'm happy to see you next time.
23:27Bye go.
23:27Bye go.
23:27Bye.
23:27Bye.
23:29Bye.
23:33Bye.
23:33Bye.
23:35Bye.
23:39You